Site Status

[Theo]

We have been making some hardware changes to the site (as well as other items at our colo facility). We have added two servers dedicated to the forums (some of you might have noticed an improvement in speed, when it's working) as well as some backup machines.

But we ran into a problem shortly after installing a server. The server that is in charge of load balancing the forums, as well as many other machines, was replaced with a new server. This was one node of a cluster (we were still building the second node). But the hard disk failed on it Saturday night. You might have noticed the "Proxy" error on the web site when clicking on the forums. Anyways, this has been removed.

Today murphy visited us. One of my techs was mounting a terabyte nas server (which we use to store backups of other machines) in our rack and inadvertantly knocked out the power to 1/2 of the machines. Stupid colo... They have power strips for 12 computers in a 96u rack. We have to add our own rack mountable power strips. Those power strips (which are fairly nice) have this big ass switch that is just sooo easy to bump. I'm thinking about cracking it open and hardwiring it. Anyways, this was bumped and today the site was offline again for a few minutes.

In the next couple weeks we will be replacing the firewalls used for our network as well as this site. When we do that we will also be installing a couple new servers that will be used for the upcoming email solution for the site.

I'm not sure if Ken has kicked this out yet but like all sites that take 10gb of bandwidth per day it can use some extra revenue to pay for things like servers and bandwidth. Anyways, an idea was put into play to create email accounts for username@users.absoluteanime.com that comes with a little space space http://users.absoluteanime.com/username. Nothing is final yet but we were thinking about charging a couple bucks a year. This should balance the book.

For those interested in something like http://mysite.absoluteanime.com or http://mysite.users.absoluteanime.com (with some custom email accounts) and have some money... We can always talk.

I'm still trying to figure out why it's slow to look at a post. It was working fine last night. All of the servers are idle but it's seems to be hanging up on something.

If others have ideas for helping to generate revenue to not only keep the site alive but to grow it out I'd be glad to hear them. I know that Ken has done a lot to keep ad's from clutering the site. I think what he has done is more tasteful that others.

I have to make dinner now...

G

[Theo]

We fixed another issue with the time on the server. One of the nodes has the wrong time (25000 seconds into the future) which caused some problems with people posting. Basically it would complain about spamming the forums. This should be fixed by tomorrow at the latest. The clocks have been fixed, we just need to wait until the newest post is past the time tomorrow (for those that have the problem).

[Chibi1229]

so this is the problem i see

[Theo]

That would be correct.

[Theo]

Forums went down again today for an hour. The load balancer for the cluster has failed again. It appears to be a bug in the software. We are looking into it. The first one appeared to be a bad hard drive (running RedHat Enterprise) but this last one is on pristine hardware. It appears that the software has locked up two different computers. We will reboot the servers as we see the problem.

[Theo]

I upgraded (or downgraded I should say) the software for balancing the traffic to the forums. The product is called "ipvsadm" for those interested and it's freeware from the linux virtual server project. This should work a little better. As a result there shouldn't be any more of those "proxy error's" when clicking on the forum link after a crash.

For those of you who have been paying attention over the last years you might have noticed the little counter in the lower left corner. I remember when it hit 1,000,000. That wasn't too long again. Well, anyways, we are getting ready to hit 100,000,000 pages served. I have to handed it to Ken for the great job he has done.

[Theo]

Another RedHat thing happened today. I found that when we upgraded the database from the old RedHat configuration some time ago (12 months or so) the database did not upgrade itself to the proper character set. This may or may not speed up the forum some. The change took the site down for about 5 minutes while I ran the script to change the character set. It was latin1_swedish_ci but I changed it to utf8_general_ci. Some of the admin scripts would not allow for partial text matches. So it will either a) run faster, b) run slower or c) no change at all.

[Dretlin]

I am hoping A.

[Bambi]

I am hoping A.

Same Here

[Theo]

It seems to be performing the same (which is good). The change was really to fix another problem.

[Mai]

I am hoping A.

Same Here

Ditto.

[Guest]

Mhhhh Theo, I have a problem.

My name seems to have changed and the site will not let me log in. My name Dretlin has changed to Lretin or something...

[Dretlin]

Scroll up and look at my last post and you can see that it has changed...

[josh]

Scroll up and look at my last post and you can see that it has changed...

-:�?.Ŕ.Ę.Ŧ.�?.Ϊ.Ň:-

The characteristics in your name can't be shown anymore so they're replaced with question mark images?

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I'd probably say thanks Theo but I don't have the time to read this topic yet. I gotta go right....now! (well after this is posted) byebye

[Vash]

This seems to have something to do with the update of the forum version. I had done this update recently in my forum and letters like ä (german ae) or ö (oe) where replaced with ²? or ½¿ and so on. I think the only way to solve this is webmaster changeing you name to something else (best would be just dretlin) and mail it to you so you can log on and re-change it to whatever you want.

[Theo]

Sorry about that. I'm not sure if it's just the PHP run amok or if the problem happens to be with the database modifications (or a little of both). I'm away from my server tools right now but I will try to look at it a little later today.